Insights into the regulation of human CNV-miRNAs from the view of their target genes

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Xudong Wu¹  Dinglin Zhang¹  Guohui Li¹ 

[1] Laboratory of Molecular Modeling and Design, State key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 457 Zhongshan Rd., 116023, Dalian, PR China;

关键词: Copy number variation;    miRNA;    Expression variation;    HapMap ethnic population;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-13-707

 received in 2012-04-22, accepted in 2012-12-07,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundmicroRNAs (miRNAs) represent a class of small (typically 22 nucleotides in length) non-coding RNAs that can degrade their target mRNAs or block their translation. Recent research showed that copy number alterations of miRNAs and their target genes are highly prevalent in cancers; however, the evolutionary and biological functions of naturally existing copy number variable miRNAs (CNV-miRNAs) among individuals have not been studied extensively throughout the genome.ResultsIn this study, we comprehensively analyzed the properties of genes regulated by CNV-miRNAs, and found that CNV-miRNAs tend to target a higher average number of genes and prefer to synergistically regulate the same genes; further, the targets of CNV-miRNAs tend to have higher variability of expression within and between populations. Finally, we found the targets of CNV-miRNAs are more likely to be differentially expressed among tissues and developmental stages, and participate in a wide range of cellular responses.ConclusionsOur analyses of CNV-miRNAs provide new insights into the impact of copy number variations on miRNA-mediated post-transcriptional networks. The deeper interpretation of patterns of gene expression variation and the functional characterization of CNV-miRNAs will help to broaden the current understanding of the molecular basis of human phenotypic diversity.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.